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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure Joel Spolsky said “we purchase the best machines money can buy for our developers” like 20 years ago. So it’s hardly a new concept.

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Not sure why that counts. An engineering workshop buying mint quality lathes would just be considered "Buy once, cry once" in my eyes.

Lathe sure. But what about shiny macbook pro to ssh into aws

eh, compared to salaries even shiniest macs wouldn't register in USA, especially hubs like SV. Especially if it's issued once a couple or four years.

With AI spend - especially at Anthropic/OpenAI API prices - spending 0.5-1 macbook a month worth of tokens per employee seems normal (from what I've seen, heard, what happens in this forum and thread and what my employer does).

Tokenmaxxxing (followed by commit/PR-maxxxing) is celebrated. Don't think - just launch orchestrator that will create dozen child agent sessions to do useless work to impress your superiors. If buy the end of the day you will ask to increase your token allowance - you're a superhero.

> machines

That's hardware.

I personally recall hardware flexing going back to SGI, but nothing like "look at my salesforce spend".

I've seen the other side of that coin: "my program is blazing fast in my machine, I don't know why those naggy users are complaining!"

Getting your app to run on the worst devices was artistry. Assuming the lowest IE and windows environment.

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